rushed down the front steps like an explorer hungry to begin digging. This town’s zip code, like dozens of others, had been listed in her father’s first journals. Maybe in his early years, he’d left a trace.
She told herself she’d feel it if he’d been here. If this was the place where he’d stopped wandering just long enough to care for someone.
But she felt only the cool winter wind whipping between buildings, whirling her around as if pushing her off any direct course.
A few blocks later, she was strolling down Main, her still-damp hair swinging in a ponytail. She blended in with the crowds, window-shopping, as if she had no direction. The smell of cinnamon and ginger drifted in the winter air, blending around pieces of conversations and laughter like icing melts into warm cake.
Jillian swore she could feel her heart slow. The very air in Laurel Springs seemed to welcome her.
Halfway down the block she found what she was looking for. A small help-wanted sign in the corner of a window.
Above hung a faded sign that read LAUREL SPRINGS DAILY.
She let out a breath through her smile. Newspaper work. She could handle that. Selling ads. Writing copy. No problem. Mentally, she made up her resume in her head. Nothing too fancy, nothing too bright. Nothing too easy to check.
As she pushed open the newspaper office door, she selected a new identity as easily as she might change a hat.
Connor Larady looked up from the copy machine he’d been trying to murder for an hour. “Morning,” he said as he set down his latest weapon of destruction, a screwdriver. “May I help you, miss?”
The woman clamoring through his office door was tall and slim enough to be a model. With hair in a ponytail and little makeup, she could have still been in her teens, but the wisdom in her big, rainy-day-colored eyes marked her as a good ten years older.
He shoved his tools aside, walked over to the front desk and tried to find a scrap of paper to write on. No one ever came into a newspaper office without either wanting something written, or rewritten.
You’d think a writer would have a pen and pad handy. Only he wasn’t much of a writer, and this wasn’t much of an office. The Laurel Springs Daily had been whittled down to little more than a weekly flyer and a spotty blog of what was happening in town when he got around to it, but he kept up the office his father and grandfather had both run.
Considering himself a good judge of people, Connor had a premonition he’d be filling out a free obit form or a lost dog report, also free.
There were some days he’d thought of combining the two columns in the weekly paper. The header could read LEFT TOWN FOR PARTS UNKNOWN. The byline could be Those Recently Departed or Run Over.
The woman moved one small step closer. Connor had no idea if she was just shy or half-afraid of him. Maybe his grandmother and daughter were right: he was starting to look like the mug shots on the Dallas nightly news. Hair too long, this was the third day he’d worn the same old wrinkled shirt, and he hadn’t bothered to remove the raincoat his gram said only a vampire would wear.
He’d tried to tell them both that he didn’t have time to commit a crime. He was too busy running the town and keeping up with them. His grandmother had taken to wandering off alone, and his daughter was worse. She preferred wandering off with any pimpled-faced, oversexed boy who had a driver’s license. Between the two of them, his curly brown hair would be gray before he turned forty. That is, if it decided to stay around at all.
Connor shoved his worries aside and waited for the attractive stranger to say something. Anything. Or run back out the door. He didn’t much care which. He had more than enough to deal with this morning, and he didn’t want to hear a complaint. Everyone thought if you were the mayor, you loved listening in detail of what was wrong in town.
Maybe this stranger just wanted to talk, or ask directions?
Conversation wasn’t his strong point. Plus, she was just the kind of woman who made him nervous—pretty, and near his age. With his luck, any second she’d decide there was more to him than people could see and would start trying to remake him into marriage material.
Maybe he should wear a sign. TO ALL WOMEN: I AM MADE OF MUD. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MOLD ME INTO, WHEN IT RAINS, I’M BACK TO MUD. Save us both some time and move on to another project.
Raising her head, she studied him a moment, then said, without smiling, “I’m here about the job.”
“What job?” He hadn’t had a secretary for two years. That had been a disaster. He could go slowly bankrupt by himself without a helper continually suggesting they buy supplies or turn up the heater, or paint the place.
The attractive woman before him tilted her head, and he noticed her eyes weren’t quite blue or gray, but they were looking directly at him. “The help-wanted sign posted?”
She’d said the words slowly as if he might need time to absorb them. “I can write copy, proofread fairly fast, and I’m willing to try any type of reporting.”
He lifted an eyebrow, thinking maybe he should recite his resume to her if that was how she wanted to introduce herself. One degree in English, one in history, a master’s in anthropology. None of which had ever earned him a dime. Come to think of it, maybe he was slow? No one had bothered to tell him that he was wasting his time in school.
This stranger in town pointed at the faded note in the window and his brain clicked on. “Oh, that job’s not here at the paper. It’s across the street at the quilt shop.” He pointed out the window to A Stitch in Time, the shop directly across Main.
“It’s been so long since I put it there, I forgot about the sign.”
“Sorry to have bothered you.” She turned, obviously not a woman to waste time.
“Wait.” He hadn’t had a single bite for the job at the quilt shop in weeks. Everyone in town knew what it was and no one wanted it. But this outsider just might be dumb enough to take it. “It’s only a short-term job. Three or four months at the most, but it pays fifteen dollars an hour if you have the right skills.”
“What skills?”
She wasn’t running at the thought of working in a quilt shop. That was a good sign. “My grandmother has owned the town’s quilt shop for over fifty years. She’s closing down, but what we need done has to be accomplished carefully. Every quilt in the place has to be cataloged for the county museum. She holds the history of this town in there.”
Connor had no idea how to say what he needed to say, but he had to be honest. “Gram’s slipping a little. Beginning to forget things. Over the years she’s collected and made quilts that mean a great deal to the people of Laurel Springs. They’ll have to be treated with care. The history of each one logged and photographed.”
“Museum-quality preservation. I understand. I worked at the Southwest Collection on the Texas Tech campus while I was in college. My salary will be twenty an hour for that detailed kind of work.”
She stood her ground and he had no doubt she knew what to do. Which was more than he knew about the process.
